


takes two to tango

by larkgrace



Category: The Kane Chronicles - Rick Riordan
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexy April, F/M, aka i fail at not self-projecting horribly onto every character ever, good job me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-04-20
Packaged: 2018-01-20 01:37:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1491955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larkgrace/pseuds/larkgrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carter's never really wanted to dance.</p>
<p>(Yes, these are all euphemisms for sex, although no actual sex is involved.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	takes two to tango

**Author's Note:**

> _An asexual person is a person who does not experience sexual attraction._  
>  -AVEN

You like kissing Zia. There are a lot of things you like doing with Zia, of course—running in the park and having movie marathons in the middle of the night and listening to music on her balcony with the breeze drying the sweat between your toes—but kissing Zia means you get to feel the feathery ends of her hair brush your cheeks and revel in the way that your arms fit so perfectly around her slender, warm waist.

You can also do these things without kissing Zia, which is part of the reason that you don’t make out obnoxiously on the couch in the middle of the Great Room like some people _(your sister)_ who shall remain unnamed. Sometimes when your eyes feel heavy you like to just lay down on top of your covers and feel her press up against your back, her breath warm on your neck and her sharp little knees pressed into the backs of your thighs. There are some nights when that’s the only way you, plural, can fall asleep without falling victim to night terrors. Funny what the end of the world does to your psyche.

But there are the nights for kissing Zia, and this is one of them, sitting against your headboard and her legs sprawled over yours and her laptop fan making an obnoxious amount of noise across the room, trying to draw her attention back to her senior research paper. Zia seems to be doing an impressive job of ignoring the whirring as she fists her fingers in the back of your shirt and starts leaving a trail of hot, wet kisses down your neck.

Your nose wrinkles a little. This is the kind of kissing you think is a little weird—the hands-up-each-other’s-shirts kind of kissing. Zia loves it, you know—sometimes her fingers will sneak under the hem of your shirt and she’ll nip at your collarbone, gently enough that you could pass it off as an accident if you didn’t vividly remember one clumsy afternoon when you’d accidentally bitten her lip and she’d made a noise that had made your entire body flush with heat. Once she’d gotten your shirt off and sunk her teeth into the meat of your shoulder hard enough to bruise; it hadn’t really bothered you as much as the unpleasant twisting sensation in your stomach when she’d growled—actually _growled—_ with pleasure.

(A few days later your sleeve had torn in a fight with a knife-headed demon, and Walt had whisteled appreciatively; the unpleasant feeling had come back as you rushed to cover the mark, red and purple and unmistakably from a human mouth.)

As it is her hands are safely just below your shoulders and everyone’s teeth are safely out of the way. You’d kind of like it to stay that way so you press a soft kiss to her hair (silky and smelling like lemons) and tuck her head under her chin. She stops kissing you and doesn’t protest verbally, but you feel the short burst of air from her nose against your neck.

It’s quiet for a long time and you run your fingers through her hair, which you also know she likes. (Movie night with the older initiates: Jaz had been trying a series of new braids on Zia, sitting between Jaz’s calves in front of the couch; she’d closed her eyes contentedly and rested her head against Jaz’s knee while Jaz tugged gently at her scalp.) She picks absently at the back of your shirt and you’re sure if you could see her face from this angle she’d have the look she gets just before she falls asleep, when her brain is running a hundred miles an hour about nothing urgent at all. Finally she kneels up in front of you and gives you a look that usually precedes a Serious Talk. You have two kinds of Serious Talks: the ones where you run a universe, and the ones where you run your lives. You’re infinitely more terrified of the second kind.

“Carter,” she says gently and yeah, this is definitely going to be a Serious Talk, “I realize that this is going to sound like a loaded question and I doubt you’ll want to answer me, but I _promise_ that I won’t be upset no matter what you say.”

You examine the pattern on your comforter, and she cups your chin in her hand but doesn’t force your gaze up.

“Carter. Are you attracted to me at all?”

Your head jerks up, and you have to open and close your mouth a few times before the words come out. “Of course— _yes,_ Zia, you’re beautiful.”

A little flush creeps up her neck but she keeps a solemn expression. “I’m sorry, my phrasing was ambiguous—I don’t mean aesthetic attraction, flattering as it is. I meant have you ever been attracted to me _sexually.”_

You feel sick. No, not sick—you feel like you did when you were twelve and your dad, in lieu of “the talk”, had given you a book about puberty, about love and sex all rolled into one word and made you read it, you have the feeling that book gave you: the feeling that you wanted to crack your ribs open and check for loose wires and missing parts. Malfunctioning machinery. You had confided this emptiness to you dad and he’d ruffled your hair and called you a _late bloomer_ and ever since you had tried not to think about it.

You feel like that now. You want to peel back the skin and muscle of your body and find what’s broken, you—you _love_ Zia, you really do, in all kinds of ways your fourteen-year-old self could never have imagined, you want to hold her and kiss her and listen to music through tinny speakers with her until you’re old and gray, and you _want_ to want her but you.

You don’t. You never have.

Your face feels hot and your expression must answer for you—it says something, at least, because Zia’s pokerface melts and she pulls you forward until you fall halfway onto your stomach with your head in your lap, and she strokes your forehead and says “Shh, Carter, I’m _not_ upset, it’s okay. Calm down.”

You’re hiccupping into the hem of her shorts, not crying but close, and you’ve wrapped your own arms tight around your ribs. You want to squeeze until you can’t feel the hollow spaces anymore and then you can love her like she wants you to, you—

“Carter, I’m not angry, please just—sit up and breathe. Please.”

You manage, and she holds the sides of your head gently so that she can look you in the eye. “Can you do two things for me?” she asks, in the kind of voice she usually reserves for calming the little kids down when they’re throwing fits—a firm, doting kind of softness. You nod. She leans in to brush her lips against yours, soft and quick, and then says, “If I ever touch you in some way that makes you feel uncomfortable, I want you to tell me and I’ll stop. Will you do that?”

You feel your stomach unknot a little, and you nod again silently.

“Thank you.” She lets go of you and stands up to retrieve her laptop from where it’s been wheezing unattended on your desk for the past half hour. She sits on the edge of your bed and clicks at the keyboard for a moment—hilariously slowly; she’s a hunt-and-peck typer and it drives Sadie up the _wall—_ and finally deposits the computer in your lap, browser open. “I’m going to take a shower. Will you read this while you wait for me?”

You look at the webpage. A plain white page with a purple banner at the top that greets you with: _The Asexual Visibility & Education Network._

“Yeah,” you croak.

She hugs you tight for a long moment, and then gets up and silently shuts the door behind her as she leaves.

When she comes back her hair is still wet and dripping down the back of her shirt and you’re staring into the middle distance outside your window. The laptop is still whirring on your legs and the fans feel hot enough to burn.

She sits down and starts running her hands through her hair, which begins to steam. “Did you read anything interesting?”

“Yeah.” You shut the laptop and set it off to the side. “How long have you known?”

“I didn’t _know_ anything,” she says, and starts braiding her now-dry hair. “I can’t define your orientation for you.”

“Thanks,” you say, and hug her—she makes a muffled sound of protest against your shoulder when she loses her place in the braid and you snicker. After a moment she pulls away and finishes twisting off her hair.

“So,” you start. “Are there…like, a lot of asexual people? Or is it not a common thing.”

“More than you’d think,” she answers, and pulls a hair tie off her wrist. “Somewhere on the AVEN site it mentions a ‘one percent’ statistic or something—which, all things considered, one percent of seven billion people is a _lot_ of people.”

“Oh. Wow.” You wonder for a moment how many people feel like you—how many of the one percent of the seven billion still feel sick. How many want to fix the loose wires.

Zia picks up her computer and leans in for a kiss, and you hope that wherever they are, those people have a Zia. “You should go to sleep,” she says.

“You say that like you won’t.”

“I don’t need sleep,” she says loftily. “I fuel myself with batteries and the blood of my enemies.”

“I’ll remember you said that when you down the entire coffeepot tomorrow morning,” you say, and she stifles her laughter in her fist as she closes the door.

You don’t fall asleep for a while, yourself. You lay under the covers and watch the moonlight crawl across your floor, and you think of the lists of names and facts and stories that—a few details aside—may as well have been your own. When you do fall asleep, your dreams are colored purple and gray.

**Author's Note:**

> I always kind of pictured Carter as being...not so much sex-repulsed but definitely sex-averse. Maybe I'm self-projecting way too much.
> 
> If you have more questions about asexuality you can visit [the AVEN website](http://asexuality.org) or you can [ hit me up on tumblr.](http://fishprincessfeferi.tumblr.com) You can also visit [this](http://queerbrooklynhouse.tumblr.com) queer KC headcanons blog!


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